Friday, June 22, 2007
$8/person ($2.00 of which goes to Equality Now!) - Buy tickets
Doors open at 9:30 pmSerenity starts at 10:00 pm
After-party after the movie!

Saturday, June 23, 2007
DOUBLE-FEATURE -- Done the Impossible and Serenity!
$9.50/person ($2.00 of which goes to Equality Now!) - Buy tickets
Doors open at 1:45pmDone the Impossible starts at 2:30pm
Intermission at 3:45pm-4:30pmSerenity starts at 4:30pm

The film, Serenity, released in 2005, was a continuation of stories and characters that began on the short-lived 2002 Fox television series, Firefly, which was created by Joss Whedon--who created the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, along with its spin-off, Angel. Hampered at the start by the network's insistence at showing a regular one-hour episode before the two-hour pilot film which explained the show's nine (!) main characters and their relationships, and its setting in a post-war, multi-planet intergalactic future of dirty Western frontiers, in which the common language is English-but-with-a-healthy-dash-of-Chinese-thrown-in, the series being successful seemed pretty impossible. There were 13 episodes filmed, and only 11 aired. Going completely out of order, the two-hour pilot film was shown last, in December of 2002, three months into the run, and after it had already been decided to cancel the series due to low ratings. The entire series--all 13 episodes, plus the pilot film--was quietly released on DVD a year later, in December 2003.

But by then, word of mouth about the quirkily serious sci-fi Western series of renegades in their run-down spaceship, exploring themes of family and commitment, love and war, sex and religion, and friendship and loyalty had spread exponentially. Caught off-guard by the thousands and then millions in sales racked up by the DVD release of a failed television series, Serenity was a successful attempt by the studios to put things right again by bringing the show's characters back and letting them finish out and conclude their main outstanding story.

"Can't Stop the Serenity" is a reference to a character in Serenity; namely, Mr. Universe (played by David Krumholtz), who traffics in the communications crisscrossing the galaxy: "Can't Stop the Signal." In honor of the extraordinary experience of the Firefly series and the Serenity film and Joss Whedon in creating both, the weekend closest to Whedon's birthday--which is June 23--has been marked as a day to set up charity screenings of the Serenity film and donate a portion of the proceeds to Equality Now, a charity that Joss supports in tribute to his late mother, Lee Stearns, who served as the inspiration for the organization; it was co-founded by one of her former students, Jessica Neuwirth.

Equality Now was founded in 1992 to work for the protection and promotion of the human rights of women around the world. Working with national human rights organizations and individual activists, Equality Now documents violence and discrimination against women and mobilizes international action to support their efforts to stop these human rights abuses. Through its Women’s Action Network of concerned groups and individuals around the world, Equality Now: